Celestron 70mm Travel Scope

[Paz]

I’ve been benefitting hugely from the reviews posted here so I thought I would make the effort to  start posting what I think of the things I’ve used. Here’s the first. I’ve been limited to using binoculars with a tripod until this week when I have joined the big league and borrowed my dad’s 70mm Celestron Travel Scope to try it out! This is the first telescope I’ve tried and I’m a beginner.

The telescope is small and light and comes in a rucksack with a light tripod. The one I’ve  used had 20mm, 10mm, and 4mm eyepieces, a 3x barlow, and a small finderscope. I’m not sure if the barlow and 4mm are part of the normal package or not.

I found it easy to set up and use. The views of the moon showed far more detail than I have seen in my binoculars and was super-bright to look at. There is a objective lense cover with a smaller cap you can take out to reduce the effective aperture – this helped a little to reduce brightness. The quality of the view holds up with the 20mm and 10mm eyepieces but the 4mm produces a more blurry picture and has very short eye relief. The barlow does what it is supposed to do but I found myself in the end just using the 20mm mostly and the 10mm sometimes and not using the barlow or the  4mm eyepiece.

The main scope provides a correct image – right side up and right way around, and the 45 degree viewing angle made it much easier to look at high objects than my straight through binoculars. The finder scope is very small and inverts the image so I actually found it easier to navigate around just using the 20mm eyepiece and not using the finder. The adjustment of the finder worked with practice but it is not very stiffly held would wander out of line sometimes. I had a good time hopping from Mizar to M101 with it. I didn’t stand a chance of seeing M101 as it’s a small telescope and I was looking through light pollution but I now know where it is for when the conditions and the equipment are right!

The tripod is fine – it is light and packs down. A stiffer tripod would obviously be better and I admit I ended up using my Horizon 8115 tripod instead just because I’ve got it available, but you can’t criticize a low cost small and light tripod for not being as stiff as a more expensive and less portable  one.

The views are much better than my binoculars although I can see some flare and getting a precise focus takes a bit of concentration. When looking at the moon still with some daylight I happened upon a star nearby that was invisible to the naked eye. I immediately realised was Saturn – I could see it was a disc and I could see the rings – I’ve never seen that detail before in binoculars.

Overall I think it is really good for what it aims to do which is to be portable, easy to use, quick to set up, and to be low cost.

[Steve Ward]

Not sure you need to run two identical reviews ... ?

[Paz]

Not sure you need to run two identical reviews ... ?

Thanks for pointing this out - I don;t know how I managed to post this twice. Is there a facility to delete one of the posts so they are not duplicated?

[John]

Thanks for pointing this out - I don;t know how I managed to post this twice. Is there a facility to delete one of the posts so they are not duplicated?

No problem - I've deleted the duplicate one.

Thanks for posting your thoughts on this scope. I'm sure it's one that will have caught many peoples eye